Imitation

Perspective is a tricky thing, it makes a lot of difficult things, hard things quite simple to deal with, but it also makes a lot of things that are of average importance seem terribly insignificant. The problem is balancing desire with rationality and hopefully a bit of levity, just looking at that sentence you can immediately see why that’s just not possible all the time.

We do sort of live our lives as ‘most of the time’ don’t we? We aren’t any one way all the time, varying, we like to see ourselves as being something or other most of the time, most of the time we’re reliable, kind, generous, thoughtful, etc. It’s interesting in that the person that dislikes you, and it is evitable that someone will dislike you whether you’re aware of this or not, will base most of their opinion of you, on the ‘some times’ parts of you they see, instances that we don’t feel reflect us accurately, those will be the things they tend to believe makes up your entirety. I say entirety because if someone dislikes you, it’s unlikely they’ll be fair and even handed with you.

You’ve sort of, got to decide for yourself who you are, other people’s accounts are too limited, too small, they don’t spend all day with you, but you do, you spend every single day with yourself, really, you’re the only one who has any credibility in talking about who you are, but we all indulge ourselves, we all lie to ourselves, it is normal, inevitable. We’re not reliable witnesses either.

So you see the problem. I’m the only one who can judge myself, but I’m an unreliable source, others, are less credible and they will be always be less informed than I am, less involved, than I am, they do not have the same stake in my happiness, in my life, that I have, so if they disagree with me, how do I know they do so based on my best interests, and not simply their own, usually their pride and their vanity?

If you tell someone, whom you know is wrong about you, that they’re wrong, they’ll just call you arrogant, and they’re criticising you, so you have to wonder why they are criticising you, maybe they are lying to you, maybe they’re making you out to be worse than you actually are, because of some personal grudge, we slight others all the time, unknowingly and with full intention. This comes back to us as aggression.

I think that’s probably why we end up in pairs. If one other person loved me, and I knew that, and I could convince them of my worth, if I could convince them that the ‘most of the time’ me is the real indisputable me, and the some of the time me either doesn’t exist or is a peculiar apparition that flits about, some of the time, and I do the same for them, and we remove ourselves from society, the way all couples do, in the matter of opinion that is, we could reassure each other, with our soft little coos, that the rest of the world is wrong, that we together form a complete whole, a perfect circle, that can’t be judge or understood from the outside because they don’t see what goes on here, how can the rest of the world know what our special little moon is like from their position? They can’t, they see us, in our beautiful splendour, and those that admire us for it are right to do so, but those that criticise us simply don’t know what it’s like so it’s little wonder, and try as we might to tell them about it, how perfect it is up here they simply can’t hear us when they’re all the way down there, really the only way for them to understand is to experience it themselves, it’s not something you can explain to others, it’s either something you understand or you don’t. So, let us pity them, for not understanding, the way we do, the way we do each other.

So then two normal, fallible people become this, rare far off sight, in their own minds, showing parts of themselves to the world time to time, when it suits them, resplendent in mutual narcissism, mutual pleasuring, mutual love, mutual hate, mutual disregard and mutual intellectualism.

A partner in crime so to speak, to justify it all, if only to one other person, because then it’s not just the individual who thinks the world is wrong, but the pair, and how could two people both see an apparition that the rest of the world couldn’t see? Surely then it’s no longer just an apparition in the individual’s mind, it is truth, this new world of theirs, and anyone else outside of the two that doesn’t see that, is either insular, arrogant, conceited, ignorant or deliberate.

It’s not like that forever though, not for all of us at least, this mutual matter starts to become uneven, one will slowly break apart, in mind, body or heart as they say, in reason, sexuality or emotion, some compensate, some resign, some see a coming war and run off, some preempt the war, some use terrorist tactics, kidnapping, sabotage, threats and demands, bribery and guilt, some even negotiate a peace before a war, it’s always down to the individuals. 

Suddenly, individuals, again.

What are we to do, when everyone is wrong? Even us.

Still, at least we’re only ever wrong after the event.

I bet every single person has or will find that.

And then the normal, predictable reply, the one used whenever doubt is mentioned, before, during and after,

‘But, don’t you know? You’re wrong, because, my love, is different.’